Salem Five’s customers now have the option to use Apple Pay with their Salem Five debit cards, making Salem Five the first Massachusetts-based bank to offer Apple Pay to its customers.

Dawn Dillon, Salem Five’s chief information officer and senior vice president of strategic change management, said the bank had been studying Apple Pay from the moment it was announced back in September.

“We decided really very quickly in September that this is something our customers are going to want, but it also is something we started to realize has real potential for the industry,” she said. “If done right and understood well, we feel it’s probably going to add a new level of security to the industry that we need.”

She was referring specifically to the way Apple Pay tokenizes payment information at the point of sale.

“This is the beginning of a much more secure opportunity for us in the payments space,” Dillon said. “When you start to study tokenized payments and think about displacing the card data on the phone, you realize this is good for everybody.”

Apple initially offered the payments app only to mega-banks, like Bank of America and Chase. Salem Five had to wait patiently for its turn, and when Apple opened up participation to other banks, they had to move fast.

“You really do have to look at the contract and read it well, and you had to be able to do that in a very quick time,” she said. “We submitted our contracts within a day of getting them. We were studying Apple Pay; we were hoping and waiting for it to come, so we were very ready.”

Apple Pay may be the beginning, but it’s not the end, Dillon said.

“We’ve really been hoping to be an innovator and have been thoughtful of our steps,” she said. “We take it very seriously to be nimble in the industry.”

A full list of banks participating in Apple Pay can be found here.